The Folly of Digital Transformations

The common story of Digital Transformation? is technology can fundamentally change a business. And it does! So what's my problem?

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My wife just got off the phone with a local hospital who is in the midst of a "digital transformation". Rather, in between getting passed back and forth between departments, she was accidentally(?) hung up on by either a system or a human. ˉ\_(ツ)_/ˉ

And then, I'm trying to pay another healthcare bill, but that system was recently re-platformed (again!). While we had an account on the previous system, the credentials were not (apparently) transitioned. So do I create a new account and risk duplicate records?

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You might already see what I'm getting at. The biggest mistake is that organizations focus too much on the technology, not the people: the customers, the employees, the partners — basically, anyone not implementing the technology but subject to it in some way or another.

Technology is often built to solve functional issues. A new billing tool. A modern appointment system. An "integrated CRM". But with all eyes on the technical connections, every point of integration is a potential point of failure for the people actually using the technology.

There's a unit vs. integration testing analogy in here. The system has been tested as a unit and passed with flying colors.

But it was not integration tested — that is, its integration with real world use cases was not tested because the unit test was an assumptive proxy.

And so people fall in the gaps created by teams and technology explicitly assembled to improve the overall system.

Which often means either 1) those people leave (a massive waste of investment!), or 2) the organization invests in another technology-focused initiative to press on the wound — a new call center system! — addressing symptoms but not injuries.

When teams neglect people from any tech-focused endeavor, somewhere along the way the digital transformation metrics will be a pleasant green while crucial people-minded metrics will be a screaming red.

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This is in funny formatting because this started out as a LinkedIn post, but I outgrew the character limit and moved it to a ranty Twitter thread before posting here.